Saving YouTube videos to disk

When collecting internet material for intelligence production, it is always necessary to create a local copy of what you find, since you cannot rely on the material to remain accessible or unchanged in its online location. For text and images this is a simple thing to do. However, for video media it can be less obvious.

For saving YouTube videos to your harddrive, I recommend a freeware tool named VDownloader (available for Microsoft Windows). When VDownloader is running, all you need to do is copy the URL presented by YouTube after clicking the Share link below the video window. Then switch to the VDownloader window to optionally edit the file name.

Videos published on YouTube can be embedded in other websites. The easiest way to save the video to disk when you find it embedded somewhere outside of YouTube is to first right-click the video frame and select “Watch on YouTube”. Then click the Share link and copy the video sharing URL.

VDownloader also captures video from a number of other services besides YouTube: Vimeo, Metacafe, Google Video, DailyMotion, Yahoo!

If you work on a PC where you don’t have administrative rights and hence cannot install software, you can try this alternative: the site PortableFreeware.com makes a previous version available, which can be run as a portable application or no-installation application: VDownloader on PortableFreeware.com.